... I found it staggering that we have seen such an increase. To go from a world where about 2 percent of the people in the developed world were facing this problem to a world where somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of people in the developed world are no longer advancing is such a substantial step up. ... First of all, the rise of technology replacing jobs. We’ve seen this today. Remarkably, if you go back 500 years, there were monks who used to write out Bibles, whose jobs disappeared when the printing press came along. But what...

Berlin’s mayor has been forced to answer questions in parliament over the decision to grant a lucrative contract to the consultancy McKinsey. The US firm has hired one of the mayor’s old party colleagues. The list of companies turning a profit from Germany’s influx of refugees grew a little longer in early March, when US consultancy McKinsey signed a €238,000 ($268,000) contract to come up with a plan to integrate the city’s influx of 80,000 refugees. Now that deal, much criticized a month ago because it had been handed to the company without a tender process, has gained an extra...

Europe’s young people lack the skills for work despite record levels of unemployment, according to a report by the US-based consultancy giant McKinsey. In its study, “Education to Employment,” published on Monday (13 January), McKinsey said one in three firms feel that a lack of skills among Europe’s youth posed major business problems, in the form of cost, quality, or time. Meanwhile, 27 percent reported that they had left a vacancy unfilled over the past 12 months because they could not find anyone with the right skills. …

OCTOBER 17, 2009 Rajaratnam Surfaced in U.S. Terrorism Probe By EVAN PEREZ and MATTHEW ROSENBERG WASHINGTON—The hedge-fund billionaire charged as part of a vast insider-trading case surfaced in an earlier, separate probe into U.S. fundraising by a Sri Lankan terrorist group, people familiar with the probe said. As part of that investigation, federal agents said they uncovered documents showing that Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group, was among several wealthy Sri Lankans in the U.S. whose donations to a Maryland-based charity made their way to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, according to people familiar with the probe. Raj...

Two weeks ago, the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. released a widely reported survey that said almost a third of private-sector employers reported they will drop their employee health insurance coverage when Obamacare's government-managed insurance exchanges come online in 2014. The survey results exploded two major claims repeatedly made by Obama during and since the conclusion of the health care debate: "If you like your health plan, you can keep it" and "It will not add one penny to the deficit." Obama and his allies reacted with fury to the McKinsey results. Obama's deputy chief of staff for policy, Nancy-Ann...

The United States will have to create 21 million jobs in the next 9 years to reach full employment, according to a study from the consulting group McKinsey. The report details how this is going to be a long slog. It will take 60 months at our current growth rate to return to pre-recession employment levels, according to the report. And that doesn't even count all those new employees entering the workforce. More Americans will need to go back to school to get these new jobs, with McKinsey estimating that the market needs 1.5 million more Americans with undergraduate degrees....

Inadequate career development has kept women from reaching the top ranks of the corporate ladder, according to a report set to be released Tuesday by management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. The report, which examines barriers to women's advancement in corporations, is primarily based on a 2011 survey of 2,525 college-educated men and women, including 1,525 individuals employed by large companies, mainly in management. Despite efforts by major companies, just a handful of women have ascended to the leadership pinnacle, the McKinsey report concluded. Only 11 chief executives of Fortune 500 companies are women, down from a peak of 15...

A paper released by McKinsey & Co. last week concludes that 28% of asset managers are not responding adequately to the recent storm hitting their industry. McKinsey chalks this behavior up to “depression and denial”. But wait. There is hope for the future of the asset management industry. The consultancy also concludes that 13% of asset management firms are “decisive operators” who have pared back costs and preserved profits (or at least, mitigated a fall in profits). These conclusions and accompanying prescriptive remedies are contained in a report called “Recovering from the storm: The new economic reality for U.S. asset...

*snip* The Obama transition team released the names of 13 people on Wednesday who will direct a top-to-bottom review of federal agencies and another six who will lead teams that will review Treasury, State and Defense department policy, budget and personnel issues. *snip* It includes four former lobbyists, three top campaign fund-raisers and two former employees of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, with some overlap among them. Four people in the group have ties to the consultant McKinsey & Co. and two have experience leading high-tech start-ups. Mr. Obama's transition advisers include Tom Donilon, a top lobbyist for Fannie Mae,...

Yesterday, consulting firm McKinsey unveiled a report.... Mayor Bloomberg and Sen. Charles Schumer (who jointly commissioned the report) gave the sobering news the attention it deserves, and Gov. Spitzer joined in. "If New York goes from being the financial capital of the world to becoming only a regional market . . . every aspect of New York life will suffer, not just financial services," Schumer said, alluding to how Wall Street drives Gotham's economy. McKinsey found trouble across New York's entire financials-services spectrum, from equity to debt to derivatives. Equities: Global firms no longer line up to list stocks on...

The world's financial system is overflowing with stocks, bonds and other financial assets -- $140 trillion worth, to be precise. The figure was released in a study by McKinsey & Co. that maps financial assets around the globe and seeks to track the flows of these assets as they move from one region to another, putting hard numbers on the oceans of capital washing up around the globe. At $140 trillion in 2005, the value of the world's financial assets hit a new peak and was more than three times as large as the total output of goods and services...

NOTE: In a recent vanity, I considered one of the real reasons for outsourcing, namely, demographics. This article first recaps that vanity, and then explores some of the changing rationales given by proponents of outsourcing. . As the United States population ages, large corporations have been realizing that a major profit center for their goods and services will be drying up or diminishing. Since the clarion call of Wall Street is for ever increasing short-term profits, without a requirement to consider the long-term ramifications of actions, the obvious “solution” has been to try at all costs to bring up the...

Healthy outlook: Chelsea Clinton, 23 next week, wants to be a business consultant specialising in the healthcare sector. Photograph by Jean-Marc Ferre/Reuters CHELSEA CLINTON is the envy of this year’s graduate trainees after being offered a $100,000 (£64,500)-a-year job with McKinsey, the New York management consultancy. Sources close to McKinsey confirmed that the daughter of Bill Clinton, the former President, had been offered an “entry level” position as a business analyst but had not yet accepted the job. Miss Clinton received similar job offers from McKinsey and Boston Group, another management consultancy firm, and appears to have negotiated a...